It’s cold. Winter Wednesday in Shanghai, and the evening has just turned from grey to black. I am standing at the crossroads of Fuxing Xi Lu and Baoqing Lu, where Baoqing shape-shifts into the famous Hengshan Lu. It’s Hengshan that I’ve come to visit. Walking with Oscar’s pub to my left, I step onto what used to be called Avenue Petain. This boulevard, stretching from the middle of the French Concession to the top of Xujiahui, is one of the most famous and popular roads in Shanghai. Lined with bars, shops, restaurants, phoenix trees, and redolent with that quintessential French Concession flair, Hengshan Lu is something of a honey pot for expats and visitors. [Read More>>]

So you want to take a quick trip to Shanghai for some shopping, or to Harbin to go on the giant ice slide; how do you go about getting plane tickets? If you speak Chinese and have enough time and initiative there are plenty of local travel agents who can book tickets for you and also a lot of Chinese language websites that do the same. But the majority of them are only in Chinese, only accept cash, and hardly any at all accept foreign cards. If you, like a lot of foreigners, are living on a prayer and a wallet stuffed with credit cards, you need a way too book your plane tickets in English, with a foreign credit card. Fortunately, there are at least three good services which allow you to do all these things and more... [Read More>>]

Spring festival, Chinese New Year, Lunar New Year; call it what you will, it is China’s most important holiday. What the Chinese call it (those who speak Mandarin, that is) is Chun Jie (春节 | Chūnjié) and it’s the time of year that millions, hundreds of millions, Chinese go home to see their families, visit relatives, exchange gifts, and start the new year off with a bang by setting off industrial grade fireworks.
There is some dispute over when people started celebrating Chun Jie but it was somewhere between two and three thousand years ago. Chun Jie – which literally translates as ‘spring festival’ – is a fifteen day period that starts off the lunar year with a bang. Ancient China was ... [Read More>>]

For some, home may be just “where you hang your hat;” for others, finding an apartment in Beijing, a city with more than 18 million people and 16 districts, is enough to give some people a panic attack as they agonize over the best location and how to go about renting a place.  Depending on your Chinese abilities, you may opt for roaming around with a map responding to classified ads and trying to haggle it out with the landlord, or choose the easier route of using a professional realtor. Many people opt for just finding apartments with other people who are looking for roommates. Indeed, this is a simpler way as long as you don’t mind living with people you don’t know. Beijing is filled with foreigners looking to live with other foreigners  ... [Read More>>]

Learning Chinese is a process both miserable and rewarding - often within the same 5 minute period. In some ways Mandarin doesn’t seem like it should be very difficult, after all the number of sounds is limited and there are no conjugations or noun classes. Unlike English which has chicken, pork, and beef – Mandarin mercifully goes the logical route with chicken meat, pig meat, and cow meat. Unfortunately, as anybody who’s studied Chinese a bit knows, the sum of the parts is an unwieldy language chock full of characters and tonal intonations that few foreigners ever master. [Read More>>]

Time and time again there are endless stories of scam artists in China and illegitimate schools who lure teachers with impressive sounding salaries and rich benefits that never come to fruition. Foreigners realize later after paying exorbitant fees and being cheated out of legitimate visas, accommodation, etc, that the company that sounded so helpful was nothing more than a man in his bathrobe on a computer in Shanghai. So then he or she is stuck in a contract in China in a school that makes him or her work 40 hours a week on a ten hour a week salary. Unfortunately, when you are on the other ends of the earth and have never been to China it’s impossible to ... [Read More>>]